24,000 more  may clear NEET with grace marks in Tamil Nadu

Status of students who already got seats in first round of counselling remains unclear.

CHENNAI: Even as students celebrate the court’s directive to CBSE to offer grace marks to students who wrote NEET in Tamil, CBSE officials are contemplating appealing further. “We are waiting for  a  copy of the judgement. After that we will decide, the further course of action,” said Sanyam Bharadwaj, CBSE-NEET director, who in a previous interaction with Express denied any error in Tamil question paper.
The status of students who have already got seats in the first round of medical counselling however remains unclear.

Ram Prakash from Tech4All
speaking at a press meet in the
city | Express

About 24,000 students wrote NEET in Tamil, and if all of them are awarded 196 marks as directed by the court, almost all of them will qualify the exam even if they have scored zero in their original evaluation. That is, all students who got more than -77 marks in the general category, and more than -100 marks in the reserved categories will clear the exam.

The NEET cut off this year was 119 for general category students and 96 for SC, ST and OBC students.
Tamil Nadu has 3,328 medical seats in government and private medical colleges under the State quota. Apart from this, there are 516 seats for students under management quota. Over 2,447 students have already been admitted to 22 government medical colleges in the first round of counselling.

“Tamil Nadu government hurried the medical counselling despite the pending case in court. They shouldn’t have rushed into it without considering the seriousness of the case,” said educationalist Prince Gajendrababu.There were 49 translation errors out of 180 questions in the Tamil NEET question paper, pointed Tech4All, a city-based NGO that provides tech solutions for social problems. The questions with errors account for a total of 196 marks.

T K Rangarajan, MP from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) filed a public interest litigation seeking grace marks for all students who wrote NEET in Tamil.However, there is no decision yet if UG medical counselling will be re-conducted, taking these students into account. Engineering admissions too may get delayed if medical counselling gets pushed.

When asked if the medical admission counselling will be conducted again fresh, Health secretary J Radhakrishnan said “We can’t comment on direction to CBSE. Let us wait for CBSE to decide (its) next course.”

Higher education Minister KP Anbalagan on Tuesday said the dates for Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions would be declared soon even if there is a delay in medical admissions.Only 1,337 students of the 9,154 (14.6 per cent) students who cleared the exam were from government schools in Tamil Nadu. This judgement may change that percentage drastically.

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